Consulting

As a manufacturer, importer and retailer, you are constantly confronted with new laws, regulations, guidelines, and standards. After all, you have to know the legal requirements that apply for your sales market. Our requirement profiles can be invaluable in this context.

Minimum Requirements

We prepare a list of legal requirements for your product. This also includes limits, methods, and the range of validity.

List of Substances with Restricted Use

For each product, we prepare a list of all legally banned substances or substances whose use is restricted. (RSL = Restricted Substances List)

Customer-Specific Profile

At request, we work with you to draw up a list of specific quality requirements for your company, which also consider, among other things, environmentally-relevant requirements.

Quality assurance means more than just testing your products. Together with you we develop processes for e.g. sample instruction, recall and crisis management so that you are prepared in the event of a recall.

Analysis and Optimization of Processes For

Supplier evaluation

Product risk assessment

Product responsibility

Material requirements

Recall management

Crisis management

Certification of Companies

in accordance with the Hermes Hansecontrol-Cert standard for "Systematic Quality Assurance".

REACh requires manufacturers and importers of products to take responsibility for the safety of all chemicals used in their products. This includes, among other things, that the data required for evaluation are obtained and that knowledge of the respective products with respect to the use of SVHC candidate substances exists. The sweeping obligations laid down in the regulation also apply for users of chemicals as well as traders of products. We tell you what needs to be done.

Background Information

Chemicals should be manufactured and used so as to minimize any negative effects for people and the environment. Today, there is still a lack of adequate data for many chemicals on the market regarding the risks to people and the environment. As a result, important information on a large number of chemical substances handled constantly in the form of products used in daily life is missing. The European chemical law underwent a fundamental reform for this reason and resulted in the creation of REACh.

Training and Consulting

Start with an individual training course and consultation at Hermes Hansecontrol or at your company. We present the essential content of the REACh regulation (objectives, core elements, terms, roles, obligations, and deadlines) and demonstrate practical solutions and steps.

Analysis

Within a production site analysis we evaluate your product range for REACh relevant articles (preparations, other relevant products) and develop a testing strategy together with you. Of course, we are also happy to test your products for SVHC candidate substances in our laboratory. The goal is to determine whether candidate substances, if they are found, have to be reported (notified) to ECHA.

Document Service

Our document service offers the possibility of obtaining standardized sample letters for suppliers and customer inquiries. We can also verify existing REACh documents (e.g. test reports) in terms of plausibility and completeness.

The law defines risk as a combination of the probability of occurrence of a hazard and the severity of the potential harm. The objective of the risk assessment is to identify risks as early as possible and to keep the timely, monetary and emotional investments as low as possible. Our services range from a feasibility study to risk analysis of consumer goods, toys and entire product lines up to product related research and ratings.

Risk Assessment - Why?

In order to strengthen consumer protection the German Bundestag adopted the Product Safety Act (Prod SG) in 2011. This requires that a product may only be made available on the market if it does not put at risk the safety and health of persons. The law defines risk as a combination of the probability of occurrence of a hazard and the severity of the potential harm. In summary it can be said that even if the likelihood of a threat is very low, it cannot be ruled out eventually which is also the explanation for the increasing number of products being recalled that have been normatively classified as safe according to ProdSG. To support you as a manufacturer to make your products as safe as possible, Hermes Hansecontrol has extended its portfolio with Risk Assessment services. Our services range from a feasibility study to risk analysis of consumer goods, toys and entire product lines to product-related research and ratings.

Since during the process flow timing, monetary and emotional investments increase, our expert team starts supporting you in the design phase to identify hazards as early as possible and to minimize risks. These are often abstract and difficult to grasp, so we work with concrete examples in order to raise awareness of potential dangers. In this way critical design errors should already be detected and eliminated early in the development phase in order to avoid imminent follow-up costs, or at least minimize them. In the following procurement phase, we assist you with the selection of suitable materials, inform you about tests required by law and also give you hints on hedging that go beyond the minimum legal requirements. Especially in the toy sector the heightened quality awareness of consumers must be considered. Compliance with the minimum legal requirements is no longer enough to obtain trust by this very critical target group. Ultimately the objective must be to reduce the remaining risk to a minimum.

The Product Safety Law (Produktsicherheitsgesetz, ProdSG) stipulates that only safe products may be introduced to the market. To eliminate any risk of becoming entangled or getting caught associated with the apparel for children, the harmonised standard DIN EN 14682, that is valid within the EU, was compiled and constantly developed further by specialists in the EU.

Requirements

As Hermes Hansecontrol is represented on this board, our experts have their finger on the pulse of the times and are happy to advise you in the correct implementation of the standard specifications: To improve understanding of the DIN EN 14682 requirements, we offer a graphical specification that describes the standard requirements in further detail and offers reliable support in designing children’s apparel for your employees – from design to the approval of your products.

Seminar

In a one-day seminar at our establishment or directly at your location, we familiarise your employees with the theoretical basics and practical implementation of standard specifications on the basis of examples.

Test samples

The test of samples by our experts serves as a verifiable confirmation of the processing method selected by you or it identifies potential deficiencies in the prototypes. We are happy to advise you of alternatives in these cases.

Problem solving

We are also happy to advise you by phone or e-mail on short detailed questions: This provides you with quick problem-solving on short notice.